EIGHT
On the way along the Nevsky Prospect in a cab, Asher recounted where and how he had seen Herr Rissler – now, apparently, Monsieur Texel – before. ‘That’s another piece of information that I shall keep to myself for the time being,’ he added, drawing the cab’s lap robe more closely around himself against the night’s brutal cold. The local population didn’t appear to mind. Carriages passed them as if it were four in the evening instead of four in the morning, and in the windows of elegant apartments above the marble-fronted shops, lamps still glowed through the raw Neva fog. ‘It was a joke in the Department, how obvious it was when the Okhrana started following one of us: one chap used to send his mistress’s footman out with hot coffee for them on cold nights. By Lydia’s list, there are nearly a dozen German specialists in blood disorders operating in Petersburg alone. It won’t take our vampire long to find another, once he learns one is blown.’
‘In truth,’ Ysidro murmured. ‘Even allowing for the fact that some of those dozen may be in Petersburg because they cannot stomach the Kaiser and his aims, as Theiss apparently claims to be. At least we know in which direction we should be looking at the moment . . . if this Theiss is indeed the man Irene saw.’ He folded his gloved hands, relapsed into silent consideration of those muffled figures on coachman’s boxes and footman’s perches, those jewel-box windows.
‘I’ll vet the others.’ Asher drew from his pocket the solid little pack of visiting cards that had been pressed into his hands in the course of the evening, at least half of them bearing scribbled invitations to tea, seances, soirées. ‘It shouldn’t be difficult, the way these people talk about each other. I’m booked for luncheon with the Circle of Astral Light on Friday . . .’
Yet in his heart he knew this was only caution. A clinic on the Samsonievsky Prospect . . . An ideal cover. Is Rissler – Texel – his only henchman? Any of the men in that enormous gold-and-crimson hall might have been German agents also. It was purely chance that I recognized Texel . . .
Would the AA send more than one agent?
They would if they believed Theiss. If they believed they could have at their call a shadow agent whom no sentry could stop, no picket see.
A German doctor here whose studies strike me as remarkably similar, the Lady Irene had written.
As if Asher had spoken her name, instead of merely thought it, he became suddenly conscious of Ysidro’s silence. Without turning from his contemplation of the street, the vampire said, ‘It is absurd to suppose that, were she still able to do so, the Lady would not feel my presence in Petersburg and contrive to get in touch with me. This policeman you spoke to – I commend your accent, by the way – said there had been ashes found, and a woman’s shoe.’
‘In the autumn,’ said Asher quickly. ‘Your friend’s letter was written in February.’
Ysidro turned his head, the tiniest human flex to his brows: evidently surprised, and – surprisingly – touched, at the offer of comfort. ‘Such being the case,’ he said after a time, ‘whose, then? Golenischev spoke of no such loss among his nest.’
‘And, in any event, it wasn’t our pro-German Undead, either. Would Golenischev have lied? Or would the girl have been a fledgling of this Prince Dargomyzhsky they spoke of?’
‘Had she been, I cannot imagine Golenischev would not have thrown the fact at his little rebels last night, in the midst of all that drama and blood. And while we who hunt the night distrust our own kind, ’tis almost unheard of for a vampire to kill another vampire or engineer his death.’
‘Would Lady Eaton have written to you, had one of the Petersburg vampires come to grief? Or of the rebellion in the Petersburg nest?’
The slight tilt of the Spaniard’s head would, in another man, have been sharply raised eyebrows, an elaborate scoff, and – in the case of the fragile old Warden of New College – an upflung hand and a disbelieving cry of, My DEAR Asher—! ‘She had little use for the other vampires of Petersburg,’ said Ysidro, as the breaking ice on the Moyka flashed below them, jeweled by the reflected lights on the bridge. ‘Never in her letters to me did she so much as mention the names of Golenischev’s fledglings. And the letter she sent me at the time of the assassination of the present Tsar’s grandfather made no mention of the event, and she only touched upon the rioting here six years ago insofar as it inconvenienced her hunting.’
His scarred forehead tugged into the tiniest ghost of a frown, and for an instant Asher recalled the rusted harp and the long-dried leather of those book covers, a library of mathematics and scientific theory that had not been updated in the course of nearly a century.
‘As to this traitor to the ranks of the Undead, and whether Golenischev is lying for some reason – and indeed whether this division in the Petersburg nest has any connection at all to the conference that Irene saw – I suspect that, for answers, we will be obliged to travel to Moscow, to ask these things of the vampires there. Can you be prepared to leave tomorrow night – this coming day’s night? There is a train at midnight, from the Warsaw Station.’
Which should arrive – Asher did some rapid mental calculation – at two the following afternoon. ‘I’ll be there.’ Arguing with Ysidro was a waste of time at best, when he had made up his mind. ‘Is there anything about this journey that I need to know?’ The scars that tracked Asher’s throat and forearms under the protective silver chains had been acquired the first time he’d gone to Paris with Ysidro.
‘The less you know the better.’ The cab squeaked to a halt by the lodge of the Imperatrice Catherine; Asher stepped down, letting Ysidro pay. ‘Vampires have preternatural skill in knowing when the living are on their track. I think it best, after you have left my trunks at the address I have hired for myself, for you to go directly to your own rooms and remain there.’
‘I agree,’ said Asher. ‘And does the Master of Moscow speak French?’
Ysidro’s eyes narrowed – he had clearly heard something about the Master of Moscow – but an evening in the company of the Petersburg vampires, and another strolling among the haut ton of the Theosophical Society and its hangers-on, had probably led him to believe that most Russians spoke French . . . Which, Asher was well aware, was not the case. Upper-class Petersburgers did – in many cases, better than they spoke Russian.
But Moscow wasn’t Petersburg. Its master, Asher was uncomfortably aware, might well be some bearded boyar who had defied Peter the Great and considered French merely the language of Napoleon’s vanquished troops.
‘I shall remain at your lodging,’ said Asher, ‘and trust that if it so happens that you do need my services as a translator, you’ll protect me from the consequences of overhearing the conversation.’
For King and Country? To keep the horror of the falling bombs, the slow-oozing gas, in his dreams, where it had lurked for a dozen years?
Or for the friend who had written, ‘By the love I bear you . . .’ to a woman who had disappeared?
‘I will do all within my power –’ there was no trace of the usual light irony in Ysidro’s voice – ‘to keep you from harm. I thank you,’ he added, almost hesitantly, ‘for your assistance in this matter. The Lady Irene—’
Asher thought, later, that the vampire had been about to speak of just why it was that he had come nearly a thousand miles to the Arctic circle – that he was about to admit that it had little to do with the governments of the world availing themselves of the services of vampires. Instead, there was one of those disconcerting moments of mental blindness, from which Asher jerked, blinking, a minute – or two minutes – or five minutes – later, to find himself alone on the flagway before the handsome bronze doors of the Imperatrice Catherine, with no Ysidro in sight.
As he climbed the steps to where the dvornik waited by the open door (doubtless noting when Jules Plummer came in, for the benefit of the Secret Police), Asher wondered if Ysidro – raised in Toledo at the height of the Counter-Reformation – believed in Hell.
‘One reads of cases now and then.’ Gospodin Zudanievsky’s French was not the pure unaccented Parisian of French governesses and expensive education abroad, but sounded, to Asher’s trained ear, like a painstaking schoolboy familiarity, built upon by years of dealing with foreign visitors to the Russian capital. All sorts of inflections cluttered it: Italian, German, English, American. He longed to sit the policeman down and take notes.
The corridors of that solid brick edifice across from the Peter and Paul Fortress had not changed since ’94. They still stank of smoke and sweat and the lingering back-taste of mildew. Cheap pine tables narrowed the hallways, heaped with the decades-deep backlog of Russian paperwork – forms, reports, permissions, requests for permissions, requests for further information before permission could be granted . . . When last Asher had been brought this way, there had been no Entente Cordiale between the Queen’s Empire and the Tsar’s. He spent an extremely unpleasant seventy-two hours in a small chamber in the basement before the Okhrana had finally believed his totally mendacious story and let him go. He knew how close he’d come to never being heard from again.
Had Zudanievsky been with the department then? He didn’t recall the man, but nevertheless increased his swagger and his drawl. ‘Well, what I always think is, like Hamlet says, there’s more things than meet the eye.’ He puffed on his very American and extremely foul-smelling cigar. ‘Things that can’t be explained. I admit, a lot of ’em are total horse-hockey. That woman in Paris they always talk about, back in whenever it was, seventeen hundred and something . . . You can’t tell me it wasn’t her husband that soaked her in gin and lit a match. But some of those others . . .’ He shook his head. ‘I just don’t know.’
‘And this Orloff—’
‘Or whatever his name was.’
‘Precisely. He said that a relative of his—?’
‘His sister,’ agreed Asher somberly. ‘He told my— Well, I happened to be party to a conversation where this kind of thing came up, and another of the folks there kind of scoffed at it, and he said no, that it really could happen because it had happened. His sister caught fire, he said, out of the clear blue, with no fire in the room nor nothing to burn, and she sure wasn’t no drinker, the way some of these poor folk here was. He said the fire was so hot it burned up even her bones. He said— He was damn shook up about it. You could see it. Now, I’ve traveled some, and I do know how much fuel it takes to make a fire that hot and reduce a grown woman’s body down to nothing.’
‘And did he say,’ inquired Zudanievsky, pale eyes sliding sidelong to Asher behind the fish-eye spectacles, ‘if his sister had been involved in any . . . any curious activity, prior to her immolation?’
‘Is pourin’ vodka over her own head what you’re talkin’ about?’ If he could have kept his heart from beating quicker at the question he would have – the policeman had the look of a man who could have heard such a thing. Curious activity???
They turned a corner and passed through a narrow door. Asher felt his hair rising on the nape of his neck at the smell of the low-ceilinged corridor, dingy with gaslight and seeming to sweat fear from its walls. The stair they’d taken him down was at the far end . . . But Zudanievsky turned almost at once and unlocked a little office.
‘Nothing of that kind.’ There were shelves in the room and boxes on the shelves. Zudanievsky lowered the gasolier down closer over the central table – battered, stained, with the air of careless uncleanness so familiar in the offices of Russian police – then fetched a stout tin lock-box from a shelf. ‘Was Devushka Orloff mixed up in any club or organization, in the months before the . . . incident? Did her brother ever mention the Circle of Astral Light, or the Cult of the World Soul?’
Asher laid his cigar on the edge of the table. ‘Now, that I don’t know. It was only the one time he talked about this, and he was a little drunk – and, like I said, his name might not have been Orloff. He did say he hadn’t seen much of her . . .’